Thursday, September 2, 2010

When I was a kid, there were few human beings walking the face of the earth that I more admired than Darryl Strawberry. (Back then, if I had been given the choice of a dinner with Darryl Strawberry or George Washington, Strawberry would have won it in a heartbeat.)

He was possibly the most talented player on the '86 Mets. (My other favorites were Keith Hernandez, Lenny Dykstra and Doc Gooden.)

When you went to Shea Stadium, you would see him hit these moon shots which would simply rocket out of the park. He was truly a sight to behold. He was every bit as good as A-Rod and those juiced up homerun hitters -- but in the days before steroids.

Well, the Straw now has an apartment in NYC, thanks to the fact that he just opened up Strawberry's Sports Grill in Queens. And yours truly was allowed to visit the 6-foot 5-inch baseball deity a couple of weeks ago.

Of course, the story wasn't about Strawberry the man -- who endured as much as any great athlete who fell from grace ever endured. He battled with addiction, arrests and colon cancer. (None of which I could get into in this kind of article. But Michael Sokolove wrote an extremely heartbreaking story about all of that for the New York Times Magazine back in 2001.)